This experiment of the Guardian’s and Neiman Lab’s succeeding review of it are incredible.   It used to be almost unthinkable for newspapers to be this outwardly engaged with their audience, and today, it seems almost every news outlet out there is scrambling to get their audiences involved.  Still, the Guardian stands out for the brashness of its approach: for making hundreds of thousands of pages of government expense documents available to the British public, and putting it on them to weed through the pages to come up with the story.

This is perhaps one of the boldest experiments I’ve seen so far in journalism, and it ranks up there with how reputable media organizations resorted to using amateur footage and street photography by civilian Iranians to tell the story of the Iranian election and the aftermath.  My only qualm with it would be quality control.  Dare we trust the wisdom of the crowds?  Then again, even if it fails at what it originally set out to do — pore through all these documents more efficiently — it has already probably done more for the story than the Guardian’s editors could probably have hoped for at the start.

I felt this deserved another post.  I cannot underscore how tragic it was to read about the gunning down of Ka Rene Penas.  My heart goes out to all the Sumilao farmers and agrarian reform advocates who must feel terribly sad, incensed, and yet helpless at the situation.  It is a sad, sad day to find our country has not changed one bit since 1984, since the time of ambushes on opposition voices.  How tragic to find that we are going down the route (if we are not already somewhat there) of China, Burma, North Korea, and all those other states where the threat of being silenced has kept opposition to a minimum.

Whether or not the government had to do with the gunning down of the symbolic figurehead of agrarian reform in the country today, they are accountable for it.  Human rights violations of this sort — the senseless silencing of advocates — have never stopped occuring over the past two decades. But for someone like Ka Rene to be assassinated is a disturbing sign that perhaps our democracy as we know it is on the verge of crumbling.  When the day comes that people become afraid to speak up because they fear for the lives of their families, we no longer live in a democracy, but in a bastardized mafia-run state version of it.

I don’t think I am overreacting.  If I’ve said many things about the state of affairs back home lately, it is only because I love the country, with a fierce intensity that I think everyone who’s ever had to leave feels for the hometown of his memories.  And that is why all of this — the thought that our congressmen could so blatantly abuse their power and get away with it, the thought that an honest man who believed in changing the system should have to die fighting for it — makes me terribly sad about everything.

By Pat Roque,  AP Photo

It was incredibly sickening to watch the events of Tuesday’s vote in Manila’s House of Representatives unfold, even andespecially from far away, where the actions of the pompous House majority only seem to gain a more glaring, unflattering clarity.  It is an absolute contempt for the democracy that our congressmen even think they can pull off something like this and get away with it.  And how Malacanang can keep claiming it had nothing to do with the vote – nothing whatsoever — is disgusting.

It is insulting to us as a Filipino people that our very own leaders — people who we elected — think that we won’t mind the fact that they would vote for an amendment that is clearly not in the best interest of the country.  In what parallel universe can a system which allows for a strongman rule (be it in the hands of the president or a prime minister) be acceptable?  

What infuriates me most is the fact that these politicians all vowed once upon a time never to forget the lessons of Edsa.  It is a complete mockery of the democratic ideals which our republic is founded on and a great betrayal against every single Filipino who believed that the system could work.  Every single one of these congressmen should be utterly ashamed.  Shame on every single one of you.  If I could only list down every single one of the 174 congressmen who voted for the sham of a bill, I would.  But our ridiculous, red-taped congressional website doesn’t even post records of votes.  So many expletives I could hurl at the mockery of a legislative system we have right now.  Well thank you, Congress.  Thank you for finally convincing me of something that others have tried to get me to understand in the past: our government is not worth believing in.  It has absolutely no shreds of credibility left to its name.  And people wonder why so much talent, so many idealists choose to put all their efforts towards nation-building elsewhere.  

This is why.

Since talk of a stimulus, since a sudden renewed interest in open information, things in DC have been exciting in ways I can’t even begin to describe.  If the rise in projects tracking the bailout is any indication, there’s starting to be a shift in the way people are holding their government accountable for its spending.  And for good reason–we’ve always been afforded that right by the Constitution, we’ve just never really had the technology to make it happen.  

Now that we do, and now that we’re discovering exactly how much we can do with the web, it is exciting to be in the middle of things, to be witness to groundbreaking efforts at government transparency such as WhiteHouse.gov and Recovery.gov.  Even so, never before has it been more important to continue bringing participation to the grassroots level, to serve as an even greater check and balance.  I’ve been following Apps for America, a project spearheaded by the Sunlight Foundation, which provides access to Congressional databases for developers to work on mashing-up and making sense of for the public to see.  The more I see projects like this, the more I regret not having the technical skills to be able to contribute.  But where people like you and me matter is in keeping the conversation going and ensuring that what comes out of it all is put to good use.  After all, a tool that makes sense of data is only as good as the action that comes out of it.

It is my hope that one day, we can bring it all home too.

Filipinos may find the story of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto familiar.  Bhutto, to date the only female prime minister Pakistan has ever had, directly opposed the Musharraf regime and was exiled for her party leadership, on charges of corruption.  She returned in December 2007 to run against Musharraf in the 2008 elections, defiant and stubborn about her resolve to come home in the face of assassination threats.

As far as political assassinations go, Bhutto was not the first to go the way that she did.  I wrote my thesis on another assassinated political figure–the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino, who in 1984 was shot dead as he took his first few steps back in the country from a period of exile.  At the time, Aquino was largely regarded in the Philippines as the leader of the opposition to the martial-law Marcos government, even as he lived for much of the time in prison and in exile.

When Aquino was assassinated, public outrage over the incident was tremendous.  To this day, the downfall of Marcos is  ironically credited to this event as it sparked a national protest culminating in the 1986 Edsa Revolution.

I recall getting a text message from my dad the day Bhutto was assassinated and running to e-mail my thesis advisor, David Eisenhower, about it, only to find that he’d already sent me a note.  Months ago, we had spoken about the similarities between Pakistan under Musharraf and the Philippines under the Marcos regime.  Bhutto, he said, would be assassinated if she went home.  The day that news broke out of her death, we both thought of the conversation and wondered about the wider repercussions.

It is interesting to note that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now holds the presidency, just as Corazon Aquino did after the revolution.  And the Philippines, more than twenty years after the revolution and another ousted leader down, continues to be a hotbed of corruption and traditional politicians.  The similarities are chilling.  It is disquieting to think that Philippine politics today remains close to Pakistan’s.

*   *   *

The AP reports that Benazir Bhutto has just been posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.  It is hard to know what to make of this.  While I may admire Bhutto for many things, her human rights record is not one of them.

“Who doesn’t love the smell of libertarianism in the morning?”  Stephen J. Dubner asks.  Since coming to work for a free market thinktank, I have to say I’ve been ensconced in it.  And surprisingly, happily.  While I cannot seem to let go of an unshakeable belief in some of the things that I believe a government should provide for, I have to say there is something very appealing about the true relationship that a government and its people must have when it comes to respecting personal choices and oh, say freedom.

So, libertarianism — would you be my happy medium?

Ron Paul, arguably its most vocal champion, has had a history of proposing the most audacious solutions (like getting rid of the Fed and taking a “non-interventionist” bare-bones approach to foreign diplomacy) that would never in a million years really fly in the real world, but I will give him this — maybe there is merit to proposing the crazy, if after taking a long, hard look at the foundations of this country, one finds that the current state of government compromises much of the true liberty promised to its people.

I suspect it may be as my mom fears — I’ve gone soft on liberalism.

* * *

Ron Paul on Sarah Palin –

At first, I thought it was a pretty savvy choice from a political perspective. I also knew that she had said some nice things about me in the past. At the same time, I knew that to be on the ticket, she would have to toe the line on foreign policy and the war, so that tempered a lot of my enthusiasm.

It was a somber prelude to Thanksgiving to hear about the Mumbai terror attacks, like something out of a bad dream you’ve had one time too many.  It was a Friday night, maybe, as I recall, we were searching for cheap flights in vain, when my friend gasped on the phone.  There’s been a bombing in Bombay, she said.  Shock, and sharp intakes of breath all around.  A pause.  We fumble for words about the news a little — it is always jarring, no matter how many times one hears about these things — but we are jolted out of it momentarily.  It didn’t take long to return to what it was we’d been doing before we heard of it. 

How terrible to think now of that day and how little attention we paid to it, how the news of a “bombing” easily slipped through our minds like an everyday occurrence, how accustomed we’ve become to news of such violence.  An embassy bombed in Afghanistan.  Over 100 casualties in the latest suicide bombing.  Headlines that will never capture a tragedy’s true meaning.

This week, it chilled me to read of the bloodbath in Mumbai, even days late, for we never read about the killings, never learn the names behind the faceless victims, never feel the brunt of the senseless violence in the articles that read “20 killed in a marketplace attack” day in and day out.  Did it have to take the storming of a city, the heartless shooting of husbands before wives, the massacre of a Jewish rabbi and the Hasidic Jews of Mumbai, and the  indiscriminate open fire at unarmed civilians to shake a world already desensitized?“My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai?”  It is an all-too-familiar cry, like a scene out of a nightmare you’ve had ever since you were a child.  And though we pray never to experience the same anguish, we know all this never really comes to an end.

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

That all of this must boil down to a deep-seated callous hatred born of centuries of ignorance is sad and maddening.  Hatred, especially that fueled by ignorance or vengeance, is a terrifying thing.  I keep remembering a scene I saw in a movie of the 1993 Mumbai riots, where Hindus burned, pillaged, and massacred whole Muslim communities in the city.  I was frozen to my chair, unwilling to believe this could have been real.  It happened.  People took sticks and beat women and children and burned houses down for being on the other side of the fence.  To think it is happening all over again, and it’s been happening since God-knows-when, and no one side is blameless — it is a wonder life goes on sometimes.

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia…  In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.

Since the election, since the madness of it all, this city has been changing, the landscape tangibly evolving, everything, always in transit. Just yesterday, I had a friend tell me her boss was going to work for the new administration, and she along with it. Where I work, the atmosphere is less excitable, more in stasis than other parts of this city — but the sense of shapes shifting, people leaving, coming and going, is never more present than it is now. It is a good time to be young, to be liberal, to believe in the possibility of change actually happening.

But not to be conservative.

Make no mistake — it was eight years in coming, and the change is something I am embracing. But though I’ve been staunchly liberal my entire life, perhaps as a fault of being brought up in a country that relied too much on its government for answers, I am finding there are things I understand, things I even agree with, with what the Grand Old Party is saying. Why the auto bailout would be a mistake, the problem with the new plan for universal healthcare, and even the idea that the traditional model of a liberal-arts college education now borders on irrelevant — yes, I get it.

I have never had a true affinity to conservatism, being born and raised a liberal. My only insight comes by happenstance. I never thought I’d end up working for a conservative think tank, where it is disconcerting to be socially liberal and tree-hugging. But at the risk of sounding like I’ve crossed the line (which I haven’t, really), I see the merits to conservative thinking. Yes, even today, and especially today, in an age where conservative thought seems to have lost its relevance to the world. Edmund Burke believed that the failure of the French Revolution rested on its proponents’ staunch resistance to any opposition to the thought of liberté! égalité! fraternité! So it is that I’m understanding — perhaps for the first time — the importance of conservatism, amidst the euphoria over liberalism that’s engulfed Washington over the past month.

Conservatism is in a state of flux, thrown into a sudden existential crisis that perhaps has been long in coming. That doesn’t mean it will wither away. It will change, that is certain, and will see more criticism than ever before, but most important of all, it will not cease to remain the voice of the opposition. And all for the better. America will always need its conservatives to keep its liberals in check. Without one or the other, democracy fails.

But political ideology aside, there is no doubt it is a wonder to be here. To be present, in this time and in this place, to witness what is perhaps the greatest affirmation that anything is possible in Barack Obama’s victory — that is a gift.

Peggy Noonan, who is arguably the most eloquent political writer I’ve come across and who wrote the words that made Ronald Reagan the “great communicator,” sums it all up in the best possible way:

What a thing this is going to be to see. What luck to observe it.

- Peggy Noonan

[Cross-posted]

It is difficult to articulate what fascinates me so much about the Internet and politics, the Internet and democracy.   But allow me to dream for a minute.  For months now, I’ve been itching to put together a project or write something — anything — on everything from the initial discussion to the unprecedented election of Obama as president and the role that the Internet had to play in it, even if everyone’s written about it already.

By now, it is a given, uncontested, soberly accepted fact that the key to Obama’s success was not just the message, but the medium.  Marshall McLuhan might have spoken convincingly about light bulbs and television in arguing that “the medium is the message,” but never has this been more clear than in the case of the Internet and Barack Obama.  ”Al Gore may have ‘invented’ the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium’s potential,” reports O’Reilly.

To try to account for the roots of the Obama victory online and see just how far-reaching his message was would entail a massive study into archived Internet matter.  And in the ever-evolving space that is the online commons, who knows how different the world wide web will be when you emerge from the annals of pre-Obama campaign fodder?  By now, we know who won and grasp the significance of the collective efforts that it took to make it happen.

But here’s where it matters — in 2010, the Philippines will elect its next president.  And in this critical election, you have the whole host of characters meeting again and more than just the distant possibility of the country taking more than just a few steps backwards.  But in 2010, there is that chance to make things right.

Where all of this matters, is if the Philippines manages to go the same route — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, with how technologically savvy and irrepressibly imitative of success we are as a people — then we might actually be able to pull off what just happened here.

I’ve been studying the Internet for different reasons over the past few years.  The first research paper I ever wrote, I did on how the Internet was being used for education, back in the days of Geocities and Yahoo.  But it is the thought of the 2010 elections back home that feeds this interest today.

My love-hate relationship with the World Wide Web began when I was in the fifth grade and Geocities was in vogue.  Back then, it was hip to have your own personal site, and ICQ was the instant messenger of choice.  I remember going online, trying to study HTML on my own because it was cool, and chatting with virtual strangers halfway across the world.  There is a thrill I can’t describe to it.  Maybe it was in the feeling of making a connection.

I wrote a letter to an old friend today, who described to me the wistful experience of revisiting old SMS messages and clearing them.  It struck me how I can’t seem to compartmentalize enough to be able to hang on to everything; each time I clear my inbox, I fear I’m forgetting something.

Every now and then, I go through my inbox and delete old ones to make room for new messages, and I’m down to goodbye messages just from last year.  I used to have them all the way up from the first time I left home, now, I’m left with Christmas 2007 messages.  Haha.

A sobering thought–do we have to forget old memories to make room for new ones?  Do we lose touch with old friends when we come across new ones?  I shudder to think so, but I’m afraid I might be guilty of that.  I go on Facebook, I look at pictures on people’s Multiply sites, I read people’s LJs, so I always feel like I know what’s going on; when in truth, I really don’t.  It is an artificial sense of keeping in touch; what is sacrificed, I still don’t fully know.  I may know what you felt yesterday, according to your Facebook status, but do I really know how you feel?  How jarring it is to feel like I’m a stranger to the people I remember being friends with at home, when in truth I’ve seen pictures and read their thoughts all the way up to yesterday.

Truth: how jarring it is to feel so distanced from people, but to know so many aspects of their lives.  How strange it is to be able to “Facebook friend” someone you met at a happy hour yesterday, and go through his or her pictures of last year’s Halloween shenanigans after only having met the person really for thirty minutes.

Social media.  On most days, I love it, but there are some days it just gets to me.